The On-Demand Generation

Over the last couple of years I’ve come to realize that my children are growing up in a vastly different media world than the one in which I came of age. It’s not just the endless amount of content, it’s the on-demand availability of all that content. I’ve got to wonder how this is affecting their relationship with the world.

Between my parents generation and mine, the only real innovations of mass media were the color television set and UHF. When I was my son’s age (4) back in 1978, we had three networks, PBS some local channels and no VCR. If I wanted to watch Sesame Street, I could do so just once a day at the scheduled time. If I missed the Big Bird segment it was lost to the ether. If I wanted cartoons at noon, too bad, Gilligan’s Island was all that was on. This really wasn’t that long ago but the technology seems ancient.

My son has a list of twenty or so children’s programs he likes to watch and which we have saved on TiVo. Whenever he wants, click, click, it’s on. He misses something, we rewind. He gets bored, we change to one of the other sixty or so saved programs or any of the piles of DVDs. What the hell is this doing to his sense of the world? He already gets quite agitated if we happen not to have a saved version of the exact show and episode we wants.

O.k., disparage my parenting skills for letting my children watch television (we do spend a lot of non-media time with them too, I promise), but my family is hardly alone. We have a whole on-demand generation growing up. They (well, the privileged ones) will live in a world where whatever entertainment they want will be available immediately. There is a structure-less nature to on-demand. How will this affect their relationships with each other, with politics, with more static versions of culture (the novel, sculpture, painting, even live theatre)?

I wish I had an answer for that. But I guess, as one of the pioneering parents of the on-demand generation, I’ll have to do what all parents do – figure it out as I go.

Generation Gaps and Obama

In a post discussing her own reservations about Barack Obama, Amba tangentially discusses the disconnect between herself and her more liberal friends and family.

The dyed-in-the-wool Democrats I know, many of them in my own family and among my closest friends, are very solemn about being in (as opposed to on) the right. To them, the simple virtue of being simply pro-choice , antiwar, green, and anticorporate is obvious and incontrovertible. If you tell them you don't think it's that simple, they look at you like you've sold your soul to the devil. Not to unquestioningly accept the pure rightness of those positions is to have malignly mutated, to have become stupid, greedy, backward, and corrupt.

I wonder if it’s a generational thing or perhaps a regional thing (Amba’s roots are in deep blue Chicago and New York City as distinct from my red and purple Dallas and San Antonio roots), but my left-leaning friends and family are not nearly so absolutist. Yes, I know the type of which Amba writes and I do catch some flak for the rightward slide I’ve taken, but only a handful of those with whom I’m closest believe liberalism to be “obvious and incontrovertible.”

Almost all my closest friends and family are Democrats and only a tiny fraction are significantly conservative, so this isn’t a matter of me not knowing enough people on the left. However, other than my online blog friends and my parents, everyone I talk politics with is roughly my age. When I voice a more conservative stance during friendly debates, I am not looked at as a mutant but rather engaged. They may not often concede any ground, but they will take my opinions seriously.

I bring this up as a long way to voice a thought about why younger voters are backing Obama in such large numbers. It’s not just youth’s well-documented infatuation with the new and vibrant, it’s that when Obama talks of bridging divides, people of my age (33) and younger believe it is realistically achievable because the newer generations are not as intransigently partisan as are the baby boomers. Just as Obama’s bi-racial identity is a much more common experience in my generation, Obama’s inclination to be less rigid is more common to those of us who’ve grown up in (and grown weary with) the polarized glare of our parents’ ideologies.

Sure, you have deeply divisive younger people like thirty-something Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos whose obdurate and blindly loyal liberalism makes your average New York City baby boomer look positively bipartisan, but my experience leads me to believe, on the whole, us Gen Xers and Yers are less committed to defending ideology to the death and more interested in ending or at least assuaging the political bitterness. Maybe that’s just my specific cohort, but I think it may play into Obama’s ability to get his message across to younger voters. It may also be why, on the Republican side, John McCain, Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul captured the youth vote in the earlier contests, with all three offering messages significantly removed from the George W. Bush style of polarizing politics (represented this election by angry-pundit backed and youth-vote loser Mitt Romney).

It’s a decent theory – too critical of baby boomers and too complimentary of my generation for sure – but it’s worth thinking about and is far less derogatory than the going theory that younger voters are just naïve hope-addicts.